Pem’s Tech Blog

On Martingale:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)
* http://wizardofodds.com/gambling/bettingsystems.html

1) In a true random memoryless game, any betting strategy can not improve the odds.  A 50/50 coin flip is still just a 50/50 coin flip, no matter what your bets.  The previous coin flip does not affect the next coin flip.

2) If you flipped a coin 9 times and it was heads all 9 times, what are the odds of the 10th flip being heads?  The only thing going on here with someone who says it’s 0.5^9, is that they misunderstood the question.  (ie, silly language trick gimmick)

3) Okay, I guess the "intuitive" part of why one should expect Martingale to work is…  If you did literally have infinite bank roll, then you would eventually break the streak.

Might be interesting to think through why exactly both "3)" and "1)" are true.

*** wrote this post since friend mentioned it during Vegas trip

Pem (Admin) :: 2009/08/17 (Monday, August 17, 2009) :: Games :: No Comments »

What’s the best part about Mac OS X?  Is it the fact that it’s different than Windows?  No, let’s be honest, the best part about Mac OS X, and the only thing that makes it useful, is the fact that you can run Windows on it.  Let’s be honest, the only thing useful about a Mac is that you can run Windows on it.  Okay, sarcasm aside, of course this means I had my few weeks of fun with Mac OS X, and now it’s time to look at (dual-booting with Boot Camp) and (virtualization with Parallels and/or VMware Fusion).

Fortunately (thank god), I can use my same (Windows 7) boot partition both for dual-boot and for virtualization.  Here’s the summary of how I set it up:

1) get ISO and/or DVD of Windows 7

2) run Boot Camp in Mac OS X to create the partition, simple / self-explanatory (I gave mine 35 GB of hard disk space)

3) boot from Windows 7 DVD, format Boot Camp partition (mine was 35 GB) (so it will be NTFS), install Windows 7, do the usual install/update stuff

4) inside Windows 7, insert Mac OS X install DVD, and it will run the Boot Camp setup / install wizard, so that you will have a Boot Camp control panel in Windows

5) reboot back into Mac OS X (you can select from the Windows Boot Camp control panel to restart and boot Windows, or you can hold down command or something during the boot: later I will check if you can make it a 5 sec count-down timer like my Vista boot loader does)

6) install Parallels and/or VMware Fusion 2.0 (I did Parallels Desktop 4.0), create a new virtual machine, point it to the Windows 7 iso or dvd-drive, and make sure to select Boot Camp partition when it asks.  I left the default 1 GB RAM 1 CPU for now.  It gave me warnings that I will need to reactivate MS Windows and MS Office, and that Windows 7 isn’t officially supported by Boot Camp yet (I ignored the warnings).  I let Parallels do its thing, and eventually has you log into Windows and run a virtual disc setup.exe file to enable the Coherence mode.

7) to shutdown Mac OS X, it says to shutdown the virtual machine (Parallels with Windows) first

Okay somehow this broke my Boot Camp.  I can’t seem to boot natively into Windows anymore via Boot Camp???  Startup Disk only shows the Mac OS X disk???  Never mind, shrug, somehow rebooting multiple times, with the Mac OS X install DVD in the drive caused (Startup Disk) to show it again.  I also went to the Boot Camp wizard inside Windows (inside Paralells) and selected boot from Windows there.  After all this, I also finally got it to show the boot menu by pressing (ctrl, win, alt, ctrl, win, alt, over and over, during boot-up)

9) boot (Windows 7) with Boot Camp, looks good , boot (Mac OS X) then open Parallels virtual machine pointing to the same (Windows 7) partition, looks good , enter Coherence mode and open OneNote.  God’s in his heaven- all’s right in the world

Now for the crazy stuff…  I wonder if it’s going to break my notes if I do this: (Mac OS X runs Live Mesh native.  OneNote running inside Parallels points to Live Mesh folder for notes).  Arg, this is probably a dangerous idea.  Maybe I should redo this to be running Live Mesh inside the (Windows 7) partition, and point my OneNote notebook to that copy…

Btw, I will post some screen shots later, and probably also try out VMware Fusion with the same Windows 7 partition (hopefully it’s okay to run all 3 from the same disk)

Pem (Admin) :: 2009/08/08 (Saturday, August 8, 2009) :: Operating System focused: Mac OS X :: 1 Comment »